Oolite Bulletins

Note: This post contains a minor spoiler or two.









So, last weekend, my Commander reached the magic number of kills, and was offered the Constrictor mission. (Yes, it takes that long when you take long breaks from playing and usually only shoot in self-defence.) However, when I docked, the spinning Constrictor didn't look like a Neolite ship at all. Well, it wasn't, it was Sung's. Thinking this was a bit odd, but suspecting it to be the old alphabet rule again, I added all the shipsets I have sitting on my hard drive, and tried again. Yep there's Sung again. So I removed Sung, tried again. Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot? That's a Deepspace Constrictor. Okay, pull that out. What's next? Griff. Remove that. Shady Sung. Next? Smivs. Then what? Neolite. And finally, the standard core game version.

I found no rhyme or reason to this, so today I did some testing. At first I assumed they actually had a set order of priority, so I added them back in reverse order. However, that produced some unexpected results. It took me a while to figure it out, and there is probably some things I've missed, since I didn't test out all combinations. To those of you who are still reading at this point: I'm gonna skip straight to the results while you are still able too keep your eyes open.

I used the following shipsets for testing:
Deepspace - the ADCK no-overwrite version
Griff - the standalone version
Neolite
Shady Sung
Smivs
Sung
With the exception of making DS no-overwrite, none of them have been tinkered with after download.

- With all 6 installed, I got a random selection from DS, Griff, ShSung & Sung.
- Whenever I had DS and/or Griff installed, Neolite or Smivs never appeared.
- However, Neolite/Smivs were sometimes chosen ahead of the two Sungs.
- Neolite never appeared when Smivs was installed.
- Finally, at one point when I only had DS & ShSung installed, the standard Constrictor from the core game appeared.

There is obviously some randomness going on here, and since I didn't do an infinite amount of test it is possible that it was Rosencrantz flipping his coin throughout, so the findings should be taken with a grain or two of salt.

Having spent a bit of time on this all-important question, is there someone more knowledgeable that can shed some light on this seeming semi-randomness?

For the record: Tested under Win XP, 1.74, AddOns folder empty except for the OXP ship I was flying and the relevant shipsets.



PS: As a side effect of looking at that mission screen more than a hundred times, my inner Grammar Balrog Nazi awoke: My local copy of the missiontext.plist has now lost an offending space in "ship yard" and gained a comma in an appropriate spot in the phrase "Your mission should you choose to accept it". Perhaps someone ought to make the necessary changes to trunk?

CheeseRedux wrote:

Having spent a bit of time on this all-important question, is there someone more knowledgeable that can shed some light on this seeming semi-randomness?

There are probably three different things happening, making that there seems no logic. I don't know all those oxps but:

- Some use the same shipkey for the constrictor. Those will overwrite earlier loaded versions. (e.g. neolite does this). This is the least compatible way as there can only be one this way.
- Some use keys of their own. That way the system will choose at random between the versions and no version gets overwritten.
- Some use keys of their own and at the same time tell to not use ships with the original key. You also loose all others that overwrite the original but there can be many different versions this way. (e.g. griff does this) This is the most compatible way as there can be several this way that can add their ships without overwriting.

Right, so if we regard the seeming suppression of Neolite/Smivs by Deepspace as a statistical error (since DS at one point allowed for the original ship to appear) we get the following:

Griff will coexist with any others using their own key (DS, 2xSung), but suppress any using original key (Neo, Smivs, original).

DS & 2xSung will coexist with anything.

Neo & Smivs, using the original key, will suppress the original. Whichever wins (loads last) will suppress the other. Will coexist with anything not using original key.


It all makes sense now. Thanks a bunch!